


The lamp of love (Bring me to life)

by gloss



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - Regency, Clothing Porn, F/F, Ghosts, Hand Kisses, Haunted House, Lady Rakes, No Spoilers, seances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-08-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:00:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25924771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: Regency AU. Dashing rake Gideon succumbs to the pleas of a very intriguing ghost.(Harrow the Ninthauthorized every possible AU and I am *here* for that. Also I wanted to see Cam and Gideon in tight, tight breeches. That said, there aren't any Ht9 spoilers here.)
Relationships: Camilla Hect & Gideon Nav, Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 22
Kudos: 106
Collections: The Prince Regent's Birthday Regency/Victorian Flash Exchange





	The lamp of love (Bring me to life)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inquisitor_tohru](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inquisitor_tohru/gifts).



> title from [Shelley](https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/two-spirits-allegory) \- _Within my heart is the lamp of love,/And that is day!_ \- and canon-approved Evanescence.

By the close of the season, Camilla Hect had become, to no one's greater surprise than Gideon herself, her closest friend. To think that they'd begun as rivals, even enemies! Several nights at the faro table worked their magic, as did their near-simultaneous disappointment in Lady Coronabeth Tridentarius.

They had each flirted with her, considered her the most challenging and attaching young lady in the current crop of dewy-cheeked, scintillating-eyed debutantes. Each had _waltzed_ with her, each had managed to become lost while on a stroll with her in Vauxhall. Each had tasted her sweet, plump lips and then felt her sharp, worrying bite.

Gideon bled under her teeth and needed to tie her neckcloth much higher and more ornately for a week or so afterward. 

That evening at the club, upon spotting the new knot, Camilla had shaken her head, her gray eyes somehow both amused and kind.

"Tridentarius?" she asked quietly.

"Damnable woman," Gideon replied.

Smiling at that, Camilla tipped her head to the side to show her own, nearly-vanished bite bruise. They were, it seemed, friends.

Everything that had marked them as rivals now became more than reason enough for friendship: the small number of lady rakes, their mutual interest in both hunting and dressing well, their identical club memberships.

They made a dashing pair at the Assemblies and driving Camilla's sleek new curricle behind her matched grays. Gideon was taller, broader through the shoulders, with that fall of rusty hair, while Camilla was slighter and neater, but they both wore their pantaloons drawn as tightly as possible, their Hessians polished and softly murmuring as they strode, and their waistcoats neat and short. White shirts and 'coats for them both — Camilla's undertoned in blue and gray, Gideon's in warmer oatmeal and even the faintest buttercup yellow.

By next season, they were sure to be sharing lodgings and dividing up the new cohort of debutantes to flirt with and quiz madly and steal first kisses from.

Just now, however, it was the middle of November and Camilla had convinced Gideon to escape the City with her. She was bound to visit her cousin at his tutor's estate in Shropshire, eager to stalk pheasant and woodcock and avail herself of both the manor's wine cellars and the local maids.

◇

Gideon was not at Devintash Hall a full day before she met the ghost. She and Camilla had arrived just before dinner, rattled by the journey and nearly raving with hunger. They ate well at Palamedes's table, drank even better, and fell face-forward into their beds before the moon had even finished rising.

Gideon woke a few hours later, still drunk, and spent several moments trying to remember where she was. When she did, and her stomach growled, she decided to visit the kitchens and eat what she might find.

Before she could stand, even wrap her dressing gown (Turkish silk, prettily embroidered, purchased particularly for this visit) around herself, she saw the girl.

Skinny, draped in a star-strewn black gown, the girl was perched at the writing desk across Gideon's room. She wavered like moonlight over river water as she turned to look curiously at Gideon. She had a sharp, vulpine face that, nonetheless, was compelling, with enormous dark eyes and a pretty little mouth. 

"Pardon?" Gideon asked. She felt very cold and suddenly washed over with sorrow. Generally, she endeavored not to feel anything worse than _mildly glum_ , so this was disconcerting, to say the least. "Are you.... Are you lost?"

 _And can I claim discovery of you?_ , she did not add, but wanted to.

When the girl opened her mouth to speak, wisps of fog drifted out, not sound. She blinked, and her face blurred beneath an image of a skull. She turned her palms up and outward to Gideon, and her hands, then her arms, became bone. Her dress was a shroud. Her eyes were holes in the earth.

Gideon stood, and strode over, and her hands closed on nothing but drapery and shadows.

◇

"Absurd," Camilla told her over breakfast. The sun had not yet risen, but they wanted to make an early start of hunting. She passed the platter of sliced meat and scrambled eggs to Gideon. "You drank too much."

"I always drink just enough," Gideon protested. She swallowed down her coffee and stood at the sideboard to pour herself more. It was bitter and very hot, bracing. 

Through the window, the grounds still slumbered, woven over with mist and soaked with dew. The sky was clear, as yet colorless; it promised a fine day.

"The only people here are Palamedes and his tedious scholars," Camilla said as she sawed at the joint on her plate. "Not a one of them is a pretty girl, I assure you."

"She wasn't pretty," Gideon said. "She was _compelling_."

"Oh," Camilla said, boredom evident in her tone and expression.

"No, that's better than pretty," Gideon said.

Camilla frowned. "Is it?"

"Yes!" Gideon was quickly running out of any will to forebear.

"Ah, well, in that case —" 

Gideon scowled and ate several forkfuls of egg. When Camilla continued gazing at her with one cocked brow, Gideon said, "Stop quizzing me, Hect."

"I will when you stop being absurd," Camilla replied. " _Compelling_ , Nav? _Truly?_ "

Observing that the horizon was lightening to a pale lemony-rose, Gideon changed the topic to the day's activities.

◇

The next night, Gideon saw nothing.

The day after that, after the most successful hunt yet, her panniers fat with grouse and woodcock, Gideon saw the girl turning a corner in an upstairs corridor. She gave chase, but all she found was an unused bedroom. White drapes shrouded the furniture and the moonlight through one window picked out only motes slowly swirling in the air.

The night after that, however, Gideon returned rather late from amusements at the village inn. She had a local girl's kisses to recall and the scent of crushed flowers on her hands.

The ghost appeared then, arms crossed, scowling at Gideon. Her sharp features were sharper yet, displeasure etched not just in her expression but throughout her posture.

"Jealous?" Gideon asked. She tugged loose her neckcloth, then shimmied out of her breeches.

The girl spat at her. A drop like quicksilver arced through the air before spattering the toe of Gideon's left boot.

"Silly chit," Gideon said and leaned over to brush away the stain. "You know you're my erlish favorite."

When she straightened up, the girl was gone. In her wake, a chill persisted.

◇

Camilla's cousin Palamedes was unexpectedly gracious, sharp in wit and tongue as well as — in Camilla's words — unbearably bookish. Unfortunately, his friends were merely and wholly bookish, without any other qualities to make their company less painful and wearisome.

Camilla and Gideon hunted during the day, then drank through dinners that droned with philosophical conversation and academic dispute.

When addressed directly, the scholars blinked and blustered and generally could not seem to speak civilly to either Gideon or Camilla. The friends enjoyed testing this, pushing the scholars into discomfort, even distress.

"Forgive them," Palamedes said one morning, as he drew the doors to the library closed behind him. The rain outside had not let up for an entire day and Gideon, as well as Camilla, was confined to the house and growing moody. "They do not enjoy the company of..."

When he broke off, silver eyes narrowed in thought, Gideon suggested, "Non-corpses? Lively persons? People at all? Anyone remotely interesting?"

"Women," Palamedes said. "Particularly the eccentric and unconformable sort."

"As I said," Gideon replied, "the interesting."

"Indeed, just so." Palamedes smiled lightly. "My colleagues are timid. Their blood is ink, their souls sheaths of parchment. Forgive them."

Gideon kicked idly at the corner of the rug. "What do you know about ghosts?"

Palamedes clapped in excitement. "Have you met one?"

"Perhaps," Gideon replied. "Or I may have been drinking too much."

"Nonsense." Palamedes slipped his arm through Gideon's and drew her in companionably close. "You only ever drink just enough, isn't that right?"

Gideon could not help but be flattered, hearing her own wit repeated back to her.

◇

When Palamedes and his tutor Pemptos found no mention of a dead girl in the manor's archives, they arranged a sitting.

"You have no sister, perhaps?" Pemptos asked Gideon. "A young aunt? Some loved one reaching out to you?"

"I'm a foundling," Gideon informed him as she shed her greatcoat and unwound the muffler from her neck. The day's hunting had been disappointing, and the rain returned after lunch. "I have no loved ones."

"Ah, I see." His eyes darted and mouth twitched.

"Is that sympathy I see?" she asked, leaning in to peer at him.

Pemptos took several steps back. "Miss Nav!"

Laughing, Gideon sketched a bow at him. "Please. Call me Gideon."

They held the sitting in the manor's great dining hall. Lit only by a low fire, the room was crowded with shadows as the rain fell in glittering torrents outside. Camilla sneezed a few times, then dozed off, but both Palamedes and Pemptos exerted themselves for over an hour. They burned bittersweet herbs, played the piano, even had Gideon sing a song. (Half a verse into her favorite bawdy ballad, they stopped her.)

Three séances passed without word from the uncanny realms. There was an eerie whistling to be heard during the second, but Gideon was nearly certain that was Camilla joking them.

During the third, they had Gideon stare at a candle flame in a small mirror for so long that she was still blinking away spots the next day.

◇

One morning, a bright and windy one that saw the dead leaves dancing across the manor's grounds, skittering like strokes of ink on frozen iron, Gideon found a message on the writing desk in her room. She was half-dressed, her buckskin breeches tied up tightly, but her shirt still hung loose and her feet, like her neck, were bare.

Right in the center of the desk, there was a broad ash leaf, silvered in death, and written on it in rusty ink: _help me_.

Gideon lifted the leaf to her eyes, then brought it to the window and turned it over and over. She was chilled again, right down to the center of her very bones; she tasted something metallic at the back of her throat. She shivered, and fought to still herself.

"How?" she asked the room and stomped her feet. "This game becomes tiresome. Some suggestions would not go amiss! "

A thread of smoke wavered out of the corner of her eye. Swallowing her fit of temper, if only for the moment, Gideon turned slowly, following its trail. 

The girl stood at the far window. Morning light filtered through her dark gown and skull-bright face.

"I want to help," Gideon told her. "Trust me. But you're no maid to spin a dance or chuck under the chin or quiz into a fury, are you?"

The girl shook her head.

"Those are the entirety of my talents," Gideon admitted. She brightened. "Unless you need something — or some _one_ — shot? I'm a rum shot, pistols or rifles."

She shook her head again. The sun was coming up, and she was fading rapidly.

"Wait!" Gideon pitched forward onto her knees. "A duel? Camilla as my second, I'll face any fiend or fae you name!"

Now the girl smiled, but it was a mocking look, and her eyes danced, too.

Gideon sat back on her heels and crossed her arms over her chest. "Perhaps I will not help you, after all."

The girl expanded then, went bright as a flame, a burning colorless slash through the world. Gideon did not flinch, but reached forward. Honor was at stake! And quite a bit of curiosity, as well. She took hold of the flaming hem of the girl's gown and yanked on it.

The flame collapsed in Gideon's arms. She was dazzled, unseeing, for several moments. Gradually, vision returned — first the edges of things, coal-black and uneven, which were then refined, smoothed and elaborated, until she saw a real girl before her, felt her weight in her lap, smelled cinder and dust and fresh-fallen rain, saw her scowling with distaste as she extricated herself from Gideon's embrace.

"I thank you," the girl said stiffly and rose to her feet. "But _let me go_. Relinquish your hold!"

She was a slight woman, Gideon's age or a little younger, with the faintest adenoidal burr to her voice. She was furious, and all the more joysome for that.

"Not so fast!" Gideon hauled herself up into the desk chair. "Who are you? Why are you haunting me? _What do you want?_ "

"Harrowhark Nonagesimus," the girl replied.

"Flicket-a-flacket blanket hornpipe macaroni," Gideon said. At the girl's frown, she explained, "nonsense receives nonsense."

"My name," she said flatly. "Harrowhark Nonagesimus."

"Oh, of course." Gideon scratched the back of her neck. "I must have heard wrong."

"And now that you have unhanded me," Harrowhark Nonagesimus pronounced, "I must depart."

Gideon's stride was much longer, so she crossed the room faster and closed the door, leaning against it to bar Harrowhark's way. "Not quite yet."

" _Must_ you be so irksome?"

Gideon tilted her head and smiled, sweeping her gaze up and down Harrowhark's slim form. "Yes, I believe I must." She offered her hand; when, after hesitating, Harrowhark took it, Gideon pulled her close to kiss the tips of her fingers. "Now, shall we discuss your repayment? However will you express your gratitude to me for saving you?"

Harrowhark snickered. Her pale face sported two flushed patches, high on her cheeks. "Irksome."

"Delightful, you mean delightful," Gideon corrected her. She took Harrowhark's hand again; this time, she kissed the girl's palm. "You'll soon find me to be an utter delight."

Harrowhark shivered at the kiss, her hand flexing, covering Gideon's lower face. "We shall see."

.end


End file.
